


i turned my back on the story

by lady_peony



Category: Natsume Yuujinchou | Natsume's Book of Friends
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Implied Relationships, M/M, Psychic Bond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-30
Updated: 2016-05-30
Packaged: 2018-07-11 04:32:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7028740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_peony/pseuds/lady_peony
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything was, once again, in its proper place.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i turned my back on the story

The tiles under Shuuichi's calves were smooth. Warm. His fingers skittered over loose twigs, a palmful of petals, pink and white speckles on the slanted roof. He raised a hand, watched a white petal blow away from the back of his thumb on the wind.

"Can you see it?"

Shuuichi's movements stilled. He did not lower his hand. "No." He kept his eyes fixed on the line of the lake, did not turn them to the boy on his left, the one who was dark-haired, dark-clothed. "Maybe it moved," Shuuichi said.

The other's voice was confident, laced with an exposed glinting edge. Friendly or not, it was difficult to say. "Oh, I don't think so," Seiji said. "Hadn't you read up on it yourself? This type is rather...territorial."

"I'm looking for it!" Shuuichi said, less patient-sounding than he would have liked. He ignored the fluttering at the corner of his eyes.

Bird wings, perhaps. In their flight, leaves drifted down over Shuuichi's sleeve, five-pointed and a familiar red.

Shuuichi breathed in the smell of a new spring, the petals and open sky. He looked again at the lake, which looked deceptively frozen, depthless. He had read up what might be under there. It wasn't too huge a risk for him to face alone.

"You could go now," Shuuichi said, reaching his hand to the bag by his knee. "I'll finish this."

"Watch your step," Seiji said, as Shuuichi stood up. His shadow stretched long over the roof as he did, darkening the petals to indigo, a darker blush. "Are you certain you are prepared?"

Shuuichi rolled back his shoulders. Made a scoffing sound and prepared to leap forward, run towards the lake.

He couldn't.

Looked down. Saw red leaves, the points digging into his sleeves. Clinging to the tips of his shoes and weighing them down. The petals were gone.

They were spreading, and as they did, a numbness seemed to creep, steady, steady from his chest to his veins, to his spine.

Seiji was moving still, somehow. He turned to look at Shuuichi, the spring sunlight flashing from the arrow gripped in his fingers. Not drawn, yet.

"I was afraid of this."

Shuuichi tried to summon words to his throat. Tried to yell "Run." Or a smaller part of him, a much much smaller part: "Help me."

The leaves cling on to each other, fall and fall and fall.

 

—

 

Halfway down a path to a client, when a breeze runs through the surrounding trees, rustling, Shuuichi tenses, lets his eyes skim the branches above two rounds more than he normally would have.

 

—

 

A spring afternoon, crisp. The wind smells like the slice of a knife through an apple, a crack in a thawing river.

"Unhappy," Matoba said. "with the case?"

Shuuichi kicked at the sand, the merry-go-round beneath him swiveling to life. His limbs were almost too long to comfortably fit in the space between the guardrails.

"You know how it turned out," Shuuichi said. "The family was pleased. I accepted their reward." The wind whipped past, a metallic whisper through Shuuichi's ears. The youkai he had banished had shrieked louder than this, before collapsing into the center of the circle, like snowmelt in sunlight.

Everything was, once again, in its proper place. Children were free once again to play in the park, without whispers, without looking behind their shoulders for shadows that seemed a little too tall for the shade of trees. Even Urihime had worked well with Sasago on this case, surprisingly despite their last quarrel with each other. Both had harried the target into Shuuichi's trap smoothly, without any snags. 

Tomorrow would bring on the chattering of children, the muttered admonitions of watchful parents, whining spokes of passing bicycles.

The merry-go-round creaked after its half-turn. Stopped at a place without Matoba in sight.

Matoba had not opted to sit on the same carousel Shuuichi now rested on, nor chosen to sit on the swings mere footsteps away. He just stood somewhere behind Shuuichi's back, a light soft-spoken voice more than an actual presence.

He was glad he couldn't see him. He was. The paper charm over Matoba's eye; that was still a jarring reminder of their ages. Both of them a few years too old for playing at a park now.

Sweat slid down the nape of Shuuichi's neck. He lifted his eyes from the sand, skimmed them past the grounds, the silent metal structures, until they rested at the foot of a water fountain. Stopped. A purple hydrangea bush sprouted there, had appeared there at some point in the past week when it was previously invisible to Shuuichi's eye.

He looked further. There, by the park bench some feet away. Another one. Multiple ones, in a straight-edged row. Higher still, more blooms dotted the joints of the jungle gym.

Shuuichi's foot pushed off the ground and the carousel shot off. Missed his stopping point. Slowed as Shuuichi's palms almost lost their grip from the handles, skidded.

Matoba's umbrella greeted him; his face shielded but for the lower portion, the set of his smile not swayed whatsoever by Shuuichi's eyes.

Shuuichi flexed his fingers, removed them from the handholds. Pushed himself off the wheel to his feet. "I'm leaving," he said. 

He turned his neck at a creak over his shoulder. 

The blossoms twitched with the subsiding motion of the carousel. A ring of violet fists, one bunched each seat, hydrangea blooms one after the other and the other, except for the emptiness where Shuuichi had once sat.

The umbrella tilted back.

 

—

 

"Are you all right, Natori-kun? Do you need a break?"

"No, no, I'm fine." Shuuichi drops his hand from the right side of his face. Pushes aside the insistent tingling sensation that had started that morning, like something that had been held too close to a fire and was yanked away in time to avoid being burnt. "Sorry for the worry. I can finish up this scene."

 

—

 

Past sunset, two hours now. He had expected word from Urihime.

Later spring meant the nights had not yet come with a chill. Good, as he had neglected to bring a scarf with him tonight.

A hollow rusting, like tuneless wind chimes. The brush of bamboo stalks bending, the swish of something over leaves.

Shuuichi straightened his spine. "Well. Satisfied with my performance thus far, Matoba? Or are you waiting for a mess out of this case, for your gain?"

"So you knew," Matoba said. 

Shuuichi shifted on his heel, turned his eyes and his lantern towards that voice. More rustling, stalks bending as Matoba passed through them swift as smoke. "Others have found your results fairly acceptable." He didn't move in a straight line, paced instead along the curve of the bamboo grove in Shuuichi's direction, drawing close, even closer. "I don't disagree."

A fluttering shadow in Shuuichi's view behind Matoba; the bird chirps, answered by another and another. 

Shuuichi drops his chin, gaze still open as he asks, "Here to check on my latest case? You needn't have gone to all the trouble."

Matoba's visible eye blinks, slow, his smile betraying nothing like a Noh mask. "This concerns an old associate of the clan. The innkeeper. Though as you brought it up, how was your case?"

"Completed," Shuuichi said. "It was only a minor haunting, after all."

Just the usual, as it was. Whispering walls, audible laughter with no one in sight as windows slid open. More curiously, the inn's guests had complained of a stiffness in their faces after a few nights. Numb lips, eyelids, unable to make any expression other than a lifted smile.

Shuuichi hadn't found anything unsettling initially.

Then leaves had flown upwards, bursting from their veins with light. The faces fluttering, before Shuuichi had slapped a cleansing charm on the trunk, their tiny eyes and mouths ageless and laughing "Can you hear us? Can you hear us?" falling between limbs, echoing as a chorus.

Shuuichi hadn't found the story behind the tree yet. There was always something. Revenge, fury, unfulfilled wishes; but people didn't pay exorcists for their stories.

In the bamboo somewhere, a bird chirps again. Shuuichi tilts his lantern in his hand, has to balance it a bit as it wobbles. Over Matoba's shoulder, Shuuichi spots the birds, grey with gem blue wings and small scarlet streaks, some with dark-striped heads.

Something catches at the corner of Shuuichi's mind. A scroll he had read in passing, by an ancestor had a fancy for birds. "Those birds only come out in the day," he said.

His right hand swayed downwards, lowered the lantern. By Shuuichi's shadow, there are dark stamps of birds, wings outstretched. Ten, twenty. More and more, enough for a large flock. There are no sounds of wings beating in flight.

Shuuichi's fingers reached up to his glasses, tapped on them once. He looked up. "Why are you here, Matoba?"

Before Matoba opens his mouth, Shuuichi already has a paper charm clutched in his left hand. "You should go away," Shuuichi said. "If you're not even really here."

"You don't think," Matoba reached up his hand, folding down the paper doll with the motion, covered Shuuichi's lifted hand "you don't think I'm really here."

It was solid. Felt solid as Shuuichi's own fist, the wrist below, the heart beating beneath the skin.

"This was not," Matoba said, "avoidable, no matter what else you may think of me."

"Get out of _my head_ ," Shuuichi said. 

"It wasn't—" Matoba said. "Shuuichi-san, can't you just—" He frowned when Shuuichi raised his eyes to hold Matoba's gaze. 

Matoba pulled back his hand.

Shuuichi drew away from his grip and crumpled the paper doll in his fist. It was useless.

"I can't promise that here," Matoba said. 

Then he speaks of what he knows. What he intends to do, told only to the statue-still birds and Shuuichi's ears.

 

—

 

A letter might have been preferable in some ways to this.

"Well." 

"Was there something you wanted to say, Natori-san?"

Shuuichi can't see him. Still he can conjure up easily in his mind the waiting smile, too close to a smirk, the expectant impatient stare.

"Well. I wanted to know," Shuuichi licked his lips, went on, "the time for the next meeting."

A breath on the other end. Nearly could be mistaken for a sigh, to someone who didn't know better. "At five o' clock. If you must ask—Nanase-san or one of her other contacts would know." A dismissal.

"Right. Thanks." Shuuichi can't think of anything else he needs to say. Matoba is not feeling too talkative today either, from what Shuuichi hears. "Bye then."

He hung up the phone with a click. Ducked away from the overhang of the flower shop by the sidewalk and walked to the curb to his waiting agency car.

That night, Shuuichi falls into bed without dreaming, does not see Matoba Seiji, does not see anyone at all.

**Author's Note:**

> *The bird type mentioned is the [Fairy Pitta](http://avibase.bsc-eoc.org/species.jsp?%0Aavibaseid=0ECBA40626CA630B)
> 
> *The haunted tree is based on the idea of a _jinmenju_ , the tree with human faces.
> 
> *who thinks writing a spontaneous dreambond au for these two is a good idea? (that's me ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯)
> 
> *title taken from Richard Siken's poem "Detail of the Woods":
> 
> _I looked at all the trees and didn’t know what to do._   
>  _A box made out of leaves._   
>  _What else was in the woods? A heart, closing. Nevertheless._   
>  _Everyone needs a place. It shouldn’t be inside of someone else._   
>  _I kept my mind on the moon. Cold moon, long nights moon._   
>  _From the landscape: a sense of scale._   
>  _From the dead: a sense of scale._   
>  _I turned my back on the story. A sense of superiority._   
>  _Everything casts a shadow._   
>  _Your body told me in a dream it’s never been afraid of anything._
> 
> *once again, jan attempts to stomp my heart to pieces with this [unbelievably lovely artwork](http://epiphenomenal.tumblr.com/post/146547552612)


End file.
